TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

Bill Gates Thinks about the Web Service Protocol Workshops

In an article on eWeek about one of Bill Gates' famous "think weeks", he makes some interesting comments about the Web Service Protocol Workshops:

The only way that Web services applications will get to critical mass is if the customers can see that IBM and Microsoft and others have really come up with a set of protocols that not only look good on paper but actually have been tested between the products, and they're actually at quite a rich level of capability, like the lower-level Internet protocols themselves.

And so it's super important strategically to us, and I think to IBM and to others as well, to complete the rich Web-service protocols. The ones that are to get concluded this year include the ReliableMessaging, the security and the transactions. In fact, they're very close to being done. We've had a lot of what we call inter-op fests.

Like the one you and [IBM senior vice president] Steve Mills did in New York last year?

Well, he and I did a big event. That was a very big thing late last year. But even since then, without Steve or I, there've been these inter-op fests. Other vendors besides IBM and Microsoft come in with their code to test against our code, and we're really very concrete about, 'OK, is the specification clear about this piece, now let's get that to be very clear.'

The inter-op fests have gone very well. And so it's a pretty exciting thing that there's a matching set of protocols - for the low-level connectivity it's the Internet protocols, for high-level connectivity we're going to have better protocols than even homogeneous systems have had between each other.

[ eWeek - What Is Bill Gates Thinking? ]

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